And, as frequently they must have been on such still and silent evenings, he was bored out of his mind and thoroughly pissed off at the entire universe.
Huddled down behind the low, dry stone walls of the shepherd’s shelter, the Syrian teenager drew his rough woolen cloak closer about him and reviled sheep, his parents, and kismet in general.
He loathed spending his summer vacation in his grandfather’s back country village. However his mother, a professor of history at Damascus University, had insisted, saying that it would “put him in touch with his Arabic heritage.”
Sakim scratched and swore again. To date, all it had done was to put him in touch with a thriving population of fleas. At the moment, all he wanted was a hot bath, his personal computer, and the cordiality of his well-endowed, blonde, Swedish exchange-student girlfriend. Heritage be damned.
Suddenly, stock bells clanked and rattled from the direction of the bed ground, accompanied by a chorus of perturbed bleating. Something was stirring the flock. Sakim rose to his feet and peered out into the darkness.
The sheep were all on their feet uneasily, as if they sensed a threat. Sakim’s hands tightened around his shepherd’s staff, the black shadows suddenly more tangible around him. Nervously he reminded himself that there were no wolves or lions left in his world to be afraid of.
And then he heard the sound, a strange hissing whine like nothing he had ever heard before, a metallic whisper that seemed to crawl over the ground,
And then it was upon him and the future crashed in upon the past.
It was overhead, just for an instant! The moonlight gleamed on a flattened dishlike shape in the sky, so low that it seemed as if Sakim could reach up and touch it. He felt a brush of hot wind on his face as the disk blasted past, and then, as swiftly as it had come, it was gone.
The flock exploded, panicking sheep scattering in all directions. The shepherd ran as well, back for the village, frantic to tell someone that he, Sakim Tuhami, had seen a flying saucer.
Upon hearing his grandson’s breathless report of the phenomenon, Sakim’s grandfather first beat the boy thoroughly for abandoning his flock and then sought out the village imam for advice. That worthy suggested that Sakim be beaten again for disrespect, the telling of a falsehood, and a generalized godlessness.
Miles away and unaware of the havoc it had wreaked in the life of a Damascus high-school student, the flying saucer proceeded about its mission: to seek out a particular set of Global Positioning System coordinates locked into its guidance package and to perform a certain series of actions upon its arrival there.
The coordinates designated a point along a narrow two-lane highway that served as the solitary access to a well-guarded industrial complex in an exceptionally isolated corner of the Syrian desert some sixty miles from the coast.
Inbound, the saucer had been painted repeatedly by defense radars. However, its small size, ground-hugging flight path, and stealth composite structure gave it immunity to the probing beams.
Approaching its target, the flying saucer (or the discoid aeroform reconnaissance drone, if one preferred) went to hover a quarter mile off the roadway. Balancing on its lift fans, its sensors scanned the highway for movement or activity.
There was none. At this moment, as had been projected in the mission planning, the armored-car patrols that routinely prowled the road were out at the far ends of their sweeps.
Guiding in via the invisible infrared impulses of a ground-scan laser radar, the four-foot-wide disk crept closer to the highway. Precisely twenty feet off the pavement, the drone went to hover again, sinking to within a few feet of the ground. The door of a small internal payload bay cycled.
A stone plopped onto the parched and dusty soil.
Roughly the size of a man’s fist, it was literally identical to a thousand other desert-varnished stones within a quarter-mile radius. This stone, however, cost not quite one million dollars.
A layer of thermocouples lined the stone’s artificial shell. By day, they would use the heat of the desert sun to recharge a long-duration battery. This battery in turn would power an instrument originally designed for use aboard a NASA space probe, specifically an area scintillator capable of detecting minute changes in the radiation background count of the local environment. The battery would also power the tiny burst-transmission radio that would beam the recorded data from the instruments up to a National Security Agency ferret satellite in orbit high above the earth.
The drone zigzagged back and forth over the highway, dropping a pattern of other hypertech “rocks.” Plop, a gravimeter that would register the variances in the local gravitational field produced by the passage of traffic on the roadway. Plop, a micro-seismometer sensitive to vehicle generated ground vibration. Plop, an omni-directional microphone pickup capable of registering the sounds of engines and running gear.
The data from this sensor net would permit NSA analysts to identify the type of every vehicle entering or leaving Syria’s largest special weapons research and development facility, its ambient radiation emission, and its approximate payload mass.
Combined with the other data accrued from the NSA’s fleet of orbital intelligence-gathering platforms, it would give the United States a fair notion of just where Syria stood with its covert atomic weapons program.
Its mission accomplished, the drone reversed its course, racing back for the Sea.
Off the Syrian Coast
13.7 Miles South of Jablah
0145 Hours, Zone Time: July 27, 2008
Lieutenant Commander Mahmud Shalakar paced the narrow patch of deck available within the wheelhouse of the Syrian navy’s fast-missile corvette Raqqah. Tonight’s operation should have been routine, a standard offshore security sweep such as he must have performed a hundred times in his career. Yet, this had not turned out to be the case.
This night was… haunted. He could not produce a better term for it than that. Intermittently since nightfall, ghosts had stalked his radar screens. Faint, transitory contacts appeared at varying ranges, only to fade before a plot could be established. At seemingly random intervals, blotches of mysterious interference materialized and then dissolved, looking suspiciously like some form of jamming. Likewise, his electronic-warfare receivers recorded mysterious blips and chuckles in the radio spectrum, but never anything that could provide a definite bearing for a direction finder.
The Raqqah’s systems operators were sweating blood from their captain’s repeated and raging demands for more data. So far, they had not been able to produce anything solid enough to act upon.
The Syrian officer fished a buckled cigarette out of his uniform shirt pocket and kindled it with a quick snap of his lighter. All Shalakar had to work with was the sensation that the events were thickest along this particular stretch of coast. Something was going on out there, right under his nose. He could feel it.
But what? And maybe more importantly, who?
Syria’s strategic naval position in the eastern Mediterranean was far from enviable. They were wedged in tightly between Israel and Turkey, both of whom were regional maritime superpowers. What was worse, Shalakar brooded, the damn Jews and the damn Turks had become thick as thieves over the past decade. They were always up to something.
Beyond that, Syrian fleet intelligence reported that a small American task force was lurking offshore, and Allah alone knew what the Americans were going to do next.
Be that as it may. There was nothing for Shalakar to do but to keep all hands at their battle stations and stand ready to act.
“Helm,” he snapped, “reverse course! Bring us about one hundred and eighty degrees and take us half a kilometer closer inshore.”